Learning to be authentically real.

Contrary to its more virulent critics, reality TV is not corrupting society. Rather, it draws upon a culturally approved fetish of ‘authenticity’. Historically, this has developed hand in hand with the devaluation of social life, a growing perception of a world in which public life, work and production more generally lack meaning or purpose. Little wonder that the philosopher with whom the notion of authenticity is most closely associated, Martin Heidegger, wrote his existentialist opus, Being and Time, during the late 1910s and early 1920s – that is, when liberalism, the sustaining ideology of the nineteenth century, was ceasing to provide a framework in which to explain the social world, let alone, legitimise it.

He wrote it around 1925-7, but then authenticity isn't about correspondence with the real.  ¶ 8:58 PM